--- Yoshie wrote:
> It's been the case in many countries, not just Iran,
> that those whoespouse economic liberalism also
> espouse secularism and liberalism incultural and
> social terms and vice versa. Lebanon is a good
> example,and so is Russia, to a lesser extent. If
> that overlap didn't exist, women's struggle, for
> instance, would be easier.
It is interesting how global a phenomenon this has become.
Free market ideologues have managed to create the impression that they have a trademark upon the ideas of secularism, rationalism, the Enlightenment, anti-obfuscation.
In books like Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, or Levitt and Gross's Higher Superstition, the impression created is generally that it is primarily those leftists who are the strange, obfuscatory, counter-enlightenment elements of society.
In Richard Dawkin's book A Devil's Chaplain, he spends whole chapters polemicising away at phantom postmodernist strawmen, as well as quasi-mystical pop-science interpretations of non-linear dynamics or quantum mechanics for new age audiences.
Yet, these militant defenders of science and the enlightenment never see fit to criticize equally bogus appropriations of scientific jargon in booster books like Kevin Kelly's Rules for the New Economy or Out of Control.
It seems that as long as one pays obeisance to the scientific priesthood, one is spared the humiliation of being pushed into the corner of the counter-enlightenment.
It's one reason why I think the militant, programmatic atheism of the likes of Dawkins is so bogus when it is not integrated into a general critique of social relations. Militant posturing that might "tweak the hayseeds", but does nothing to touch the dominant social order.
That is why, as much as it is correct for emancipatory forces to critique theocratic systems like that of Iran, aligning with the guardians of open society and free markets/free minds is not an option.
____________________________________________________________________________________ Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail (http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/)